It’s hard to know how much help a critique group can be until you see its authors in action. You’ll get more help from a group with a few authors who have published. If you’re lucky, it’s traditional publishing at any level (small press and un-agented counts) or even self-published (using editorial rounds from an […]

I used to be an ardent fan of self publishing. I thought that the extra money you’d get out of making your own business choices, along with bigger royalties, would offset the extra work of publishing yourself. You could be rewarded with sales because no one cares as often about your book (every day) or […]

Journaling is a worthy element of the writing life. The material is right at hand, all those things that have happened to you. Or your journal might run to dreams and wishes, or deconstruct the events you've been witness to, yesterday or long ago. A journal though, no matter how carefully and faithfully kept, is […]

Every book needs a game plan to play its way into a publisher's lineup. Things like comparable books and the heartbeat promise of a story are the same for fiction and nonfiction. Unlike what you might have heard, every publisher makes an investment and wants to earn it back when they buy a book from […]

In my creative workshops we use an exercise — we write a memory we could carry into the next life. It's gotta fit on an index card. Here's one of mine. It's from my forthcoming parenthood baseball memoir, Stealing Home: A Father, a Son, and the Road to the Perfect Game. That night I didn’t feel […]

A fledgling memoir writer asked me about the prospects for transforming his work into a book. Within a couple of messages on LinkedIn, he squelched his own efforts. His book idea, about a single year of biking 5,207 miles, seemed too dim to work on. "I just doubt many would read it, even if published […]